Wednesday, August 08, 2012

The Descriptive Turn: Scales of Reading

by EILEEN JOY

As some know from my previous post, and others' posts here and on other blogs and Facebook, many of us are recently returned from the biennial meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Portland, Oregon, where Ruth Evans organized a seminar session on "The Descriptive Turn" (inspired by recent debates and discussion over "surface" versus "symptomatic" reading, the so-called "turn" to flat, microsociological description versus humanist hermeneutics, premodern post/humanisms, and so on), which I described HERE, as well as shared my own contribution to that session, "Disintegrating Allure: A Call for a New Commentariat." Julie Orlemanski graciously allowed me to also post here at ITM her contribution to the session, "Scales of Reading," and Ruth Evans will also be sharing a response in a just a few days.

Herewith, Julie Orlemanski:

Thanks to Ruth Evans for organizing the “Descriptive Turn” panel at the New Chaucer Society conference
in July and to Eileen Joy for inviting me to post my talk here. Also, in
prefacing it, I want to respond briefly to what Jonathan Hsy (Fifth Blogger,
avast!) wrote in his recent summary of NCS. Jonathan observed,

Franco Moretti's “Maps,
Graphs, Trees” is suddenly making its way into medievalist discussions as of
late; intriguing that there was a lag between its 2007 publication and its
“moment” of arrival in medieval studies. Perhaps its recent arrival has
something to do with the general Zeitgeist -- our current interests in mobile
devices, e-readers/tablets, data visualizing, and geotagging -- but I'm sure
there's a media theorist out there who has already made that observation.

I look forward to finding out about what medievalists at
present are doing with Moretti, as I wandered into reading him entirely by way
of non-medievalists -- for instance, the “state of the field” sketches offered by
Heather Love and by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best. He also seems to be a
necessary reference point when trying to get a handle on the “digital
humanities” and literary history (along with Michael Witmore and Alan Liu). The
major ideas of Graphs Maps Trees (published
in 2005) actually popped on the scene in a very accessible way in 2000, with
the publication of “Conjectures on World Literature” and “The Slaughterhouse of
Literature.” Perhaps some medievalists had a think about them then? But in
reading Graphs Maps Trees I was struck
by how ill-suited many of its strategies were for the manuscript culture of the
Middle Ages. They seem tailored for a glut of evidence, not a fragmentary
record whose contingencies of survival threaten to undermine its representative
quality. Moretti’s models also presume a capitalist economy. So, for instance,
categories of genre mean something quite different for mass-market novels than
in compiling a pastoral miscellany or composing for a coterie audience. The
great variability in the accessibility of medieval texts is worlds away from
the assumed homogeneity of Moretti’s national novel markets. Not at all surprisingly,
our modes of inquiry need to respond to different scales of economic and
discursive organization, to the vagaries of locality and the viscosity of
circulation. The scales of reading demanded by a manuscript culture differ from
those for the “age of mechanical reproduction.” As to why medievalists might be
turning to Moretti now, perhaps one reason is our waiting for the other shoe to
drop -- to see what “the turn away from the linguistic turn” turns TOWARD, or
what post-post-structuralism really does. Moretti is a remarkably clear writer
and polemicist and catalyzer of thought, and reading his work has helped me
think through some of those questions.

I would
welcome questions and suggestions and reading recommendations! These comments
are thoughts toward an essay I’ll be finishing in the early spring.

SCALES OF READING

Do the ways we study literature
face a substantial challenge from the “descriptive turn,” that loose
affiliation of experiments and polemics, manifestos and cross-disciplinary
hybrids that we’ve brought together today under one rubric? My answer is both
NO and YES. Based on what I’ve read in preparation for this panel, “the task of
sticking to description” (as Bruno Latour formulates it) does not itself demand
major methodological change. Description and interpretation, it
appears, are never so separate that they do not bleed together at the slightest
pressure.

A more decisive
challenge arises instead from questions of scale. In his 2005 essay Graphs, Maps, Trees Franco Moretti
remarks that “The very small, and the very large; these are the forces that
shape literary history. Devices and genres; not texts. Texts are certainly
the real objects of literature […];
but they are not the right objects of
knowledge for literary history” (76). Whether the “real objects of
literature,” namely “texts,” are our proper “objects of knowledge” seems to me
the most significant question raised by Moretti’s recent experiments with what
he calls “distant reading” – “where [as he says] distance, let me repeat, is a
condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller
or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes -- or genres and systems”
(“Conjectures” 57). Such a program conjures echoes of structuralism, of
phonemes and morphemes, memories of Fernand Braudel’s “breaking down time past,
choosing among its chronological realities” and Claude Levi-Strauss’s claim
that “properly scientific work consists of decomposing [one’s object] and then
recomposing [it] on a different plane” (27, 250). Indeed, we might wonder if
our current post-post-structuralist moment is the setting for a kind of
dialectically transformed structuralism. In any case, I would claim that
reading what is very large or very small, very far or very close, does
promise to constitute alternative “objects of knowledge” and provoke new
methods of inquiry.

Before
turning to Moretti’s scalar provocations to literary study, I would like to
touch briefly on something that seems to me best NOT addressed through strong
alterations in our method. This is a family of justifications for the
“descriptive turn” that derive from the so-called “crisis in the humanities.”
My conviction is that this emergency in the humanities cannot be resolved from
inside the field, and it is therefore a poor justification for fundamentally
revising how we do what we do. In fact, I’m inclined to believe that it is a
good idea to shield our basic methods from strategic “crisis-response”
as much as we can.

This “crisis,” I
would argue, does not really point to one phenomenon or problem.
Instead, its urgency flows from at least two sources, two opposed demands,
which together create a kind of double bind for the humanities. On the one
hand, university administrators, trustees, donors, and political leaders who
are concerned with constructing market-driven higher education see in the
humanities a failure of profitability. Programs are defunded and devalued
accordingly. But to “avert” such a crisis by way of disciplinary method
involves us in a project of self-negation: we “solve the problem” by ceasing to
differ and stand apart from neo-liberal market values.

The other source
of “crisis” is evident in the suggestion by several descriptive-turn proponents
that we eschew the “ethical charisma” of hermeneuts and embrace a stance of
“minimal critical agency,” suited to the “humble analyst and observer” (Love
374, Best and Marcus 122, Love 381). In other words, we adopt a method that
elaborately signifies our lack of claim to social effectivity and comport
ourselves with the ethos of Latour’s
“ant” plodding on its unheroic path. I take it that these deflationary
prescriptions express frustration, again, with the humanities’ weakness and
inutility -- this time, not with regard to neo-liberal market values, but rather
in the face of systemic, global inequalities of wealth and privilege, inequalities
that are themselves among the conditions of possibility for our classrooms and
departments (as they currently exist). Walter Benjamin famously summarizes this
contradiction when he writes, “There is no document of civilization which is
not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But the humanities ought not,
and cannot, take on this social contradiction at the level of scholarly method -- where it certainly cannot be solved. Both the “crisis of profitability” and
the “crisis of justice” -- as we might call them -- demand our attention in so
far as we are institutional and political actors, but they should not directly
determine what literary study is. They each involve us in a logic that
tends to dissolve rather than ground what we do.

At
once more energizing and more reassuring are methodological reflections that
return to the objects we study -- or at least to the business of constituting
them. This is part of what makes reading Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social invigorating: he unfolds in tandem how the
world works and how it should be studied, his “empirical metaphysics” and his
method (47). The same can be said for Moretti. While Ellen Rooney complains of
“surface reading” that “it is neither a description of the way we read now nor
a description of the way anyone might read, ever” -- an evaluation with which I
would tend to agree -- Latour and Moretti do show, as well as tell, the
difference their respective methods make (124).

Moretti
describes “distant reading” as emerging directly out of considerations of
scale. The “canon,” as Moretti describes it, is calibrated for human perceptual
labor: 200 novels correspond nicely to one career’s worth of thoughtful
perusal. By contrast the 40,000 novels published in nineteenth-century Britain
dwarf the human reader. These thousands of volumes make up a qualitatively
different entity, which demands other modes of apprehension and comprehension.
“One thing is for sure: [Moretti writes] it cannot mean the close reading of
very few texts […]. A larger literary history requires other skills: sampling;
statistics; work with series, titles, concordances, incipits” (“Slaughterhouse”
208-09).

Scale is a
profoundly aesthetic matter -- of or pertaining to aisthesis, or sense-perception. It is irreducibly a concept of
relation and refers us to our specific capacities for attention, cognition,
perception, and feeling. As art historian James Elkins observes of abstract
paintings, “what counts is that [even though the paintings are non-figurative]
the body is … immediately available through choices of scale” (16). Scale
influences where we locate ourselves, our own physicalities, in relation to a
picture -- whether myopically scrutinizing, or conversationally attentive, or
gazing from far off. The same can be said for scales of reading: they render
palpable the phenomenological determinants of experiencing texts. Most of us
are used to negotiating scales of reading, as we put together a syllabus or modulate
our reading speed. A twenty-page essay on “Ode to a Nightingale” assumes a
different calibration of “reading” to “read” than does a twenty-page essay on Bleak House.

“Graphs, maps,
and trees” are Moretti’s aesthetic solutions to the problem of how
40,000 novels can be brought into an interface with our sensorium and our thoughts.
Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, for instance,
becomes a tiny data-point in a graph. Hundreds’ of pages of chivalric
adventures in Norman England are strategically re-described through the
coordinates of genre and publication date -- in a way that makes new
understandings of genre possible. In this way, Moretti’s efforts converge with
recent projects in data imaging and digital curation -- experiments in how vast
archives can be brought into different forms of perceptibility. The question of
how individuals might experience literary-history-as-such also recalls
Chaucer’s House of Fame -- which uses
spatial and personificational allegory, among other strategies, to re-mediate the
totality of discursive tradition. One of the tasks of prosopopoeia is to create
an interface (a prosopon, a mask or
face) for phenomena of antithetical scales and modes of appearance.

There are ways
of talking about Moretti’s “other skills” of sampling and statistics, graphing
and mapping, which suggest that their distance from “reading” is one of degree
but not of kind. For instance, Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, as they frame
their computational analysis of Shakespeare’s plays, observe that “writing
itself is a prosthetic: it allows us to overcome the physical limitations of
the medium of speech and the psychological constraints of linguistic
processing” (358). Their rhetoric smoothes the way for continuity between
reading and computer processing. But there is also particular value in Moretti’s
more polemical formulations. Moretti emphasizes the difference
between his method and others and pushes his audience to recognize what is at
stake in the habitual scalar decisions we make. (In one article, he implies
that the very possibility of studying “world literature” hangs in the balance.)
He brings us to a sticking point: close reading.

(In passing, I
would note that the gist of Moretti’s challenge is not really new to Chaucer
studies but rather internal to it, perhaps even constitutive. Arguments with
the scalar logics of close reading have come from paleography, codicology, book
history, bibliography, and philology; or, to put it another way, from the
knowledge-claims of Medieval Studies as they vary from those of literature
departments…. Different units of analysis make possible different kinds of
knowing.)

In the passage
of Graphs, Maps, Trees that you have
on your handout [see below], Moretti accuses close reading of a kind of
irrationalism, or at least an irrationality of the knowledge-claims made on its
behalf. “Take the concept of genre,” he writes. “We choose a ‘representative
individual’, and through it define the genre as a whole.” Moretti calls this
“typological thinking,” which amounts to an unexamined trust in the sufficiency
of our examples. “You analyse Goethe’s novel,” Moretti continues, “and it
counts as an analysis of the entire genre, because for typological thinking,
there is really no gap between the real object and the object of knowledge”
(76). Sophisticated scholars are of course a little cannier than Moretti’s
caricature suggests, but we can nonetheless recognize the contours of our
field. After all, the standard recipe for a literary monograph is to argue a
general condition swiftly into existence and then start close-reading – both to
substantiate the broad claim and to set its limits. Moretti’s point about
scale, then, concerns this very logic, or illogic, of exemplarity. Reading a
handful of the “real objects of literature,” he claims, doesn’t actually tell
us very much about literary history.

Practical,
methodological responses to Moretti’s arguments are especially desirable right
now because his claims echo and extend some of the critiques of historicism
recently applauded in our field. Historicism, like Moretti’s “typological
thinking,” tends to rely on the “representative individual” to crystallize
something much larger and more heterogeneous. As Paul Strohm summarizes,

Although nobody
believes in the ‘spirit of an age’ anymore, new historicism was no less reliant
than old upon an unacknowledged belief in some kind of spirit-medium or ether
in which unexpected cultural affinities might emerge and repetitions and
replications occur, by an unexplained process of effortless transmission. (381)

Without an account of precisely
how a given instance participates in its class, a work in its genre, or an
artifact in its milieu, methods built around close-reading have tended to
reproduce what Strohm calls an “‘enabling fiction’: an unspoken assumption that
is demonstrably untrue, but that has, from time to time, permitted
dazzling apparent truths” (381). Close-reading’s enabling fictions are the
unarticulated mechanisms by which singular texts assume general, categorical,
or representative significance. Moretti’s “sociological formalism,” or
“quantitative formalism,” tries to sidestep “typological thinking” and aims
instead at ways of assembling texts without close reading’s aesthetic and
affective interface.

The
distinction Moretti makes between the “real objects” of literature and literary
historians’ objects of knowledge is his sharpest spur to our methodological
thinking. Is there a gap between “texts” and the “right objects of knowledge
for literary history”? Or, more to the point: is this gap more radical than the
one that sets in motion the hermeneutic circle in the first place, our image of
the interminable labor of literary interpretation?

John Frow, in
his perceptive essay “On Midlevel Concepts,” identifies his focus, like
Moretti’s, to be “the methodological question of the construction of an object
of knowledge” (243). But in response to Moretti, Frow counters that “the
dichotomy of text to smaller or greater units seems to me to beg the question
of the process by which units of analysis are constructed: devices, themes,
tropes, genres, and systems are neither given in advance not arbitrarily
constructed by analytic choice, but are, rather, necessarily implicated in and
derived from a process of reading and interpretation” (239). Frow ultimately
argues for the “methodological priority” of “‘literary’ reading itself” and the
irreducibility of hermeneutic labor (243). Frow’s essay thus maintains close
reading and interpretation at the heart of literary study, even of the
“sociology of literature” (237).

Frow’s project
of producing a sociologically informed account of literary ontology,
hermeneutic method, and (by extension) the logic of the example seems to me one
of the most productive paths to be followed in light of the “descriptive turn.”
Such theorization would not have as its primary aim the defense of our field to
those outside of it (whether scientists, administrators, or the “general
public”), but our own understanding of literary interpretation’s specific
rationality and the knowledge claims of close reading. Literary criticism has
traditionally encompassed attention to one’s own aesthetic responses (which are
themselves educated and qualified) -- the images conjured, the affects felt, the
suspense, the tedium, the places where the mind wanders or is gripped…. As
Simon Gaunt writes, “to admit to pleasure or enjoyment in our reading of
medieval texts, to acknowledge their emotive power or charm” is to help
construct “a rigorous way of talking about the affects of texts that had
enormous power to move, precisely as a means of understanding how this power
arises” (480-81). Gaunt’s and Frow’s comments maintain the phenomenological
interface of literature among the “right objects of knowledge for literary
history.” Moretti’s compelling arguments insist that we account for why this is
so.

The pursuit of literary
study in the direction Frow indicates would also demand new accounts of literary
agency. Figuring out “how a given instance participates in its class, a
work in its genre, or an artifact in its milieu” will indeed involve renewed
efforts of description, to show the specific modes of force, agency, and causal
effectivity that link such scales and sites of literary production together.
Here, I think Bruno Latour could be especially helpful, with his insistence on
the “bewildering array of entities to account for the hows and whys of any
course of action” and his conceptual tools for capturing the diversity and
displacement of agencies (47; see “Second Source of Uncertainty: Action is
Overtaken,” Reassembling the Social
43-62). Graphs Maps Trees is less
help: Moretti’s claim that devices and genres “are the forces that shape
literary history” and his gnomic dictum “form
as force” on the final page both obscure more about causality and agency
than they reveal.

Finally,
we might consider the kind of work that we understand literary-critical labor
to be -- or want it to be. Such considerations implicate what we teach, how we
research, and how close together those are. The sciences provide a salient
counterpoint, with their collaborative but hierarchized laboratories, often
organized by stark divisions of labor. The “New Criticism” that came to
ascendency in the era of the G.I. Bill as well as the stripped poems of I. A.
Richards’s “practical criticism” have a democratizing vector to them, which
passes through the validity of one’s own aesthetic responses as sources of
knowledge. New Criticism’s particular species of empiricism meant that “primary
research” was constantly going on in the classroom. Are aesthetic and
interpretive experiences (which I’m here aligning with close-reading)
methodologically expendable? If not, why not? What would it mean if we stopped
treating texts as affective scripts, as phenomenological interfaces? if we
starkly changed our scales of reading? Like Frow I am inclined to treat
aesthetic, affective, and phenomenological experience as a dialectical “moment”
in something not radically dissimilar from the traditional hermeneutic circle. Substantive
challenges to such a model of practice (like Moretti’s challenge) are
opportunities to reconsider our habits and perhaps to alter and revitalize
them.

The very small, and the
very large; these are the forces that shape literary history. Devices and
genres; not texts. Texts are certainly the real
objects of literature (in the Strand
Magazine you don’t find ‘clues’ or ‘detective fiction’, you find Sherlock Holmes, or Hilda Wade, or The Adventures
of a Man of Science); but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history. Take the concept of
genre: usually, literary criticism approaches it in terms of what [evolutionary
biologist] Ernst Mayr calls ‘typological thinking’: we choose a ‘representative
individual’, and through it define the genre as a whole. Sherlock Holmes, say, and detective fiction; Wilhelm Meister and the Bildungsroman;
you analyse Goethe’s novel, and it counts as an analysis of the entire genre,
because for typological thinking, there is really no gap between the real
object and the object of knowledge.

10 comments:

Thanks, Eileen, for posting this - and for picking up on that observation in my after-NCS summary (FYI to ITM readers: that bit quoted above orig. appeared as a posting on my Facebook profile; I've been planning to post a slightly revised version of that on ITM - with a few updates, corrections, and links - so stay tuned there). Eileen, you make really good points about the challenges of adapting models from Moretti's MGT to suit (what now remains of) a fragmentary medieval manuscript culture, and I like your thinking re: why MGT seems to be making such a splash in medieval studies *now.* I actually feel that I'm encountering medievalist thinking re: MGT not (yet) through published works but via conference talks, and the MGT connections I'm seeing are mostly in reference to cartography - e.g. (just picking at random from stuff I can remember) Ethan Knapp invoked MGT in his NCS paper on oceanic circulation in Gower, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari mentioned MGT earlier this year in her talk at a GW symposium about re-conceiving the place of the medieval Mediterranean in "world literature" and spatialized models of literary history (see her abstract here: http://alexanderhuang.org/culturaltranslations.html#abstracts); closer to *this* discussion, Tamara O'Callaghan incorporated MGT into a Gower Project talk on data visualization (i.e. modes of representing word-frequency data). So while much of this comes from another angle (as it were), this all jives nicely with what Julie observes re: strategies to "re-mediate the totality of discursive tradition" and bring vast materials into "different forms of perceptibility." I, too, would be interested to find out what other suggestions/readings/questions ITM readers might have here. Really look forward to seeing Ruth Evans' response.

P.S. Hm, looks like the link to the Latour PDF is inactive? - here's another one: http://www.erratum.org/datas/SPIRIT-PHILO-THEORY/Latour,%20Bruno/Latour%20-%20reassembling_the_social_an.pdf

Hi Jonathan! Thanks for your comments here, especially for sharing some of the ways that medievalists have been deploying Moretti recently. The mapping and world-literature angles make sense, especially in light of David Wallace’s (and all the contributors’) wondrous forthcoming *Europe: a Literary History, 1348-1418* (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/). And by the way, that’s me who’s citing you above! Eileen was just the gracious picture-chooser and post-er and first-paragraph auteur :) I’m glad our paths of cyber-communication are crossing so frequently these days -- though I wish I’d done a better job of tracking you down in Portland to chat in person!

I am in agreement with everything you say here about the trouble with applying Moretti directly to medieval stuff. Although I might push the point further. Not only does the model assume a capitalist market-system, it seems to celebrate it. There is no judgment of the data put into the system; it's just a celebration of the fact of publishing, the fact of consumption. I find that troubling.

I'm also troubled by what you point out is the pacifism inherent in a lot of the calls for new formalism. You read it as stemming from frustration, which is generous of you. At times it seems to take a certain amount of glee in its abdication of political responsibility (then again I have marched alongside one of these authors at some of the protests here, so that's certainly not descriptive of all of them). I take our job in the humanities to be teaching critical thinking, that is to teach people how to critique a given situation, not passively accept it.

Ultimately, then, a lot of the stuff Moretti and the others do seem preparatory to analysis rather than the thing itself. And I have to say that I have not been impressed, particularly, with any of the studies that I have seen coming out of the distant reading camp. Smoke was a newly intense topic of discussion in mid-Victorian literature, you say? Think that has something to do with the Industrial Revolution? What I want out of a new methodology is that it tell me something new, not get to the same point another methodology gets to, only through a more convoluted means.

Finally, a thought about your final point about New Criticism. We must remember that New Criticism, while it was a democratizing force, was also the mode of reading particular to the age of American imperial expansion. Who wants to think about the consequences of history when you are trying to be in charge of the world? I would like to think, instead of putting formalism at odds with historicism, that we learn from past intellectual movements, that we don't make their mistakes all over again. I welcome a formalist turn. I like close reading as much as the next person. But I don't think that means that we get to forget about history or ignore politics. I don't even think those dichotomies are helpful.

By the way, I'm co-organizing two panels on Formalism and Historicism at the next Kazoo. So, this conversation can continue there.

Ryan, thanks for these smart incitements to further thought! First of all, I am really excited about the historicism sessions you are organizing at K’zoo. One of my questions at present is basically, what is historicism? In the talk I was aligning historicism and close-reading because of the similar methodological criticisms made against them -- so I’ll be interested to hear how you define the polarity between “formalism” and historicism.

I completely agree with your point about New Criticism and the limits of what I called its “democratizing vector.” Any way you slice it, it’s toxic on its own: unreconstructed humanism, unreconstructed Kantian aesthetic experience, a Cold-War cocktail of “research,” populism, and cultural capital….. But I’m (thinking toward) thinking dialectically and trying to figure out what (if anything) is irreducible about literature’s phenomenological interface, the text as affective and aesthetic script. So, I’m interested in the strongest arguments AGAINST texts being the “right objects of knowledge” – to try to figure what might really be at stake in any defense of close-reading or hermeneutics. (An admittedly banal question I would want to ask you: why aren’t “formalism” and “historicism” just different “moments” in a dialectic of interpretation or hermeneutic circle or whathaveyou?)

On the question of scholars’ comportments or attitudes or self-presentations – My claim is not that scholars’ “ethical heroism” makes more sense than “humble analysis.” What interests me is descriptive turners’ apparent interest in telling other scholars how they OUGHT to be comporting themselves. Something like, “Fully, subjectively assume your utter lack of claim to social effectivity!” What are the assumptions that underlie that injunction? For me, the real bombshell of Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” was the point that there is nothing necessarily politically efficacious about unveiling the truth; assuming the True is always the Good is a metaphysical assumption, and one not backed up by much empirical evidence. She’s making room for other possible models – therapeutic, reparative. Anyway, I’m not a big fan of all that Silvan Tompkins affect-theory stuff that’s throughout the late Sedgwick, but her point stands. So, my belief is that there’s no “right” away to subjectively assume the socially contradictory place of the humanities, no proper scholarly ethos within our field. Is it more empowering, or mentally healthy, or socially beneficial, or whathaveyou, to comport yourself in academia as though you were politically powerless or politically powerful? (not that those are the only two options, and they may not even be the most relevant ones) Presumably those questions DO have answers, but only practical, localized answers, having to do with consequences and effects evaluated from particular perspectives.

@Julie: Ah, I somehow missed the transition break from Eileen to you there - in any case, what YOU said is spot on here (!), and you're exactly right that forthcoming "Literary History of Europe" from David Wallace et al. is a really exciting cartographical re-conception of literary history via trajectories (something the map interface demonstrates so effectively; thanks for that link too). And yes, our cyber-paths have been crossing so much these days, look forward to more interactions IRL.

Thanks for posting this, and so much from this session (which was concurrent with mine, argh!).

I tend to think about medieval studies' inappropriateness for Moretti's methods to be a challenge for thinking up ways of expanding or adding nuance to those methods; the sorts of work that would make a messy MS history of a text into an object suitable for such analysis could also suggest further ways of working through those so-stable-seeming Victorian texts.

Moretti, though, is all about developing these new objects for critique; if anything, he jumps too quickly from these ad hoc objects to an assured critique of them (and a Marxist one, at that), rather than neglecting critique. If it assumes a capitalist market system, it's because he's focused on the 19th century novel and the sorts of critiques of capitalism that can be mounted from it.

But it would be lovely to see what such methods would suggest about other modes of production and other economies.

Thanks to Julie, for a provocative post, and to the others for asking questions that extend her questions and nudge them in different directions. I teach the first section of GMT ("Graphs") in a graduate research methods course, in a unit on the canon that inevitably moves quickly to the question of selection and choice of what gets read in various classrooms, what gets read and discussed by the most influential people, and what gets read by the largest number of people. As such, that slippery relationship, as you paraphrase Moretti, "between the 'real objects' of literature and literary historians’ objects of knowledge" acquires a much more immediate-future valence: it's extremely interesting to work through this problem with the students in our terminal MA, some of whom are going on to PhDs and some not. The question of scale, in Moretti and elsewhere, seems to me to provoke questions of popular literature, consumption practices, and patterns of influence that will be framed (and answered) very differently by our graduates who go on to work in the writing, publishing, editing, library and information, and popular entertainment fields and those who pursue an academic career.

The grad students' blog posts tend to combine a lot of contradictory responses. On the one hand, given their contemplated futures either inside academia (where they will have to select objects of both teaching and research, and justify them as such) or outside it (in the fields I mentioned above), many appreciate the big-picture patterns that only large, synthetic approaches such as Moretti's can provide. It's a comfort to know that even though you've only read a tiny fraction of those 40,000 nineteenth-century novels, and an even tinier fraction of what's been written about them, someone has put the legwork into analyzing larger patterns of genre, consumption, and cultural construction.

On the other hand, I've frequently noticed a certain wariness amongst the English students to the kind of quantitative basis on which Moretti is conducting his research. Some students do this in a knee-jerk way ("math and science aren't going to save the humanities"), but even the more thoughtful ones rightly ask questions about rigor and precision, about sample sizes, controls, conditions, repeatability, and all those sciency kinds of things.

I hadn't thought of it in this way until I heard your talk and read this post, but the students' questions often seemed to be pointing generally in the direction of your wariness at the end of the penultimate paragraph (the vagueness of "Moretti’s claim that devices and genres “are the forces that shape literary history” and his gnomic dictum “form as force” on the final page"). Moretti's sort of work is dependent on doing two difficult and potentially mutually interfering things: identifying data that reflect cultural processes, and then charting and interpreting those data in terms of posited cultural processes, is a tricky combination to pull off, and without a maximum of care and rigor, it will risk just the sort of circular-argument weakness that close reading and historicism have both been accused of in the past. Particularly worrying in this respect were the footnotes and bibliography to GMT, which one of my students pointed out in a way I hadn't noticed myself. In the interest of producing a (very) short, big-ideas text, Moretti's documentation is lamentably brief and sketchy, failing to note in most cases when the studies were done, what their criteria were, what sorts of data they used, and so forth. Moretti's sort of work promises a great deal, but I think that these questions of scale are going to remain extremely elusive until we have a larger body of properly-conducted quantitative studies to bounce the ball against.

I wish I’d known about these discussions when they were happening. As it is, they’ve slipped off the edge of the interwebs and into the ether.

Still, I’ve though a lot about these issues and written a good deal about them. I’ve prepared an annotated list of ten posts on description and distance which you can find at this link. I preface them with a brief discussion of description in biology, which is a discipline built on descriptions a micro, meso, and macro scales.

My basic point is simple: There NOTHING obvious about description. Doing it well may not be ‘rocket science.’ But it IS subtle and exacting work and the means depend on what you want to do with the description.

Here’s a relatively brief post that isn’t about description, Structural Instability: Two Examples and a Question, but it illustrates in a very small way one kind of descriptive work that interests me a great deal. One of the examples isn’t a medieval text, “Kubla Khan.” But the other is, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

There’s one and only one place in the text where a speech runs over from the end of one stanza to the beginning of the next. That’s between stanzas 94 and 95. Is that just any old point in the text or is that a particularly important point?

The question answers itself. It’s at a very important point, as you can see by checking the text, or by reading my post. But why? Why’s that device used at that point? Was the poet consciously aware of doing it? Are readers? I certainly didn’t know about it until I went looking for it, but it may well have been registered by the unconscious process of reading meaning through signs. If so, how does that process work?

There was a time when I thought I was within years of being able to answer such questions. That time is long gone. These days I find it satisfying to describe bits of pieces of texts that prompt such questions. I figure if we amass enough of them patterns will begin to emerge, some questions will dissolve, others will answer themselves, and still others will get tossed over this or that wall so that folks in other disciplines can go to work on them.